Power of Our Stories

In 2018, Mark Nakakihara founded the Zentoku Foundation, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving stories of various generations of Japanese Americans. The Zentoku Foundation strengthens the Japanese American community by providing an enriching website and e-newsletters for all generations to cherish amazing stories, news, and upcoming events.

The Zentoku Foundation is unique because its meticulously delivered stories engulf its followers with deep, familial emotions. Much like the captivating emotions a bonsai enthusiast feels when observing the pure serenity of a completed bonsai, followers of the Zentoku Foundation sense the same harmony and raw emotions of each story. One ...

For many Japanese American communities across the country, February 19 marks a Day of Remembrance. On that day seventy-seven years ago, in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, turning the west coast of the United States into an active military zone and granting the secretary of war broad powers within those exclusionary zones.

A reaction to widespread anti-Japanese xenophobia in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 paved the way for the illegal incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans residing in those zones in concentration camps across the country, from Manzanar in California to Jerome in ...

Colonia Okinawa

The web magazine One Okinawa opened on October 30, 2019 as “a web media connecting Okinawan people (Uchinanchu) in the world.” (Note: October 30 is World Uchinanchu Day.) The same medium includes an interview with uchinanchu in Hawaii and a report of the fire that burned down Shuri Castle. The founder, Yoshiki Nagahama, is a former newspaper reporter of the Ryuku Shimpo and lives in Okinawa.

“I had the idea of launching this web magazine for several years. I found an airline ticket from Kansai to Hawaii around the end of April 2019 about 10,000 yen so ...

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For those who may not be familiar with it, can you give a summary of the events leading up to the 1907 Riot? What happened and what was the aftermath? Didn’t things get worse after that for Asians? What about the racists?

The 360 Video Walking Tour of the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots traces the history and route of the mob that attacked the Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities following the demonstration and parade organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League in Vancouver.

The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver is one of the most significant events in ...

“Nothing could be more systematic than the determination with which the mob picked out Japanese and Chinese windows and spared those right adjoining if they were those of whites. On Columbia Avenue, for example, all the Chinese windows were broken and those of two white real estate brokers were left whole.”

— The Vancouver Daily World newspaper reporting about the Powell Street Riot in 1907

Prior to making my first visit to the Powell Street Festival in August, I noticed several events in the program published in Geppo that piqued my interest, among them being the 360 Riot Walk that advertised ...